WWW robots, also called Web Wanderers, Web Crawlers or Web Spiders and often just referred to as bots (bot is short for robot), are programs devised to automatically traverse the hypertext structure of the Web thus, having retrieved a document, can recursively retrieved all the linked pages. Especially, this is the case of the numerous search engines and their robots which roam the World Wide Web finding and indexing content to add to their databases. Although most robots provide a valuable service this has developed a certain amount of concern amongst Web site administrators about exactly how much of their precious server time and bandwidth is being used to service requests from these engines. If the majority of robots are well designed, are professionally operated and cause no problems, there are occasions where robots visiting Web servers are not welcome. Sometimes because of the way robots behave. Some may swamp servers with rapid-fire requests, or retrieve the same files repeatedly. If done intentionally this is a form of Denial of Service (DoS) attack although this is more often just the result of a poor or defective robot design. In other situations robots traverse parts of WWW servers that are not suitable for being searched e.g., contain duplicated or temporary information, include large documents or e.g., CGI scripts (CGI is a standard for running external programs from a World-Wide Web HTTP server). In this latter case and in similar situations, when accessed and executed, scripts tend to consume significant server resources in generating dynamic pages thus, slow down the system. In recognition of these problems many Web robots offer facilities for Web site administrators and content providers to limit what the robot is allowed to do. Two mechanisms are provided. One is referred to as the ‘Robots Exclusion Protocol’ even though it is not really an enforced protocol but was a working document discussed as an Internet-Draft by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 1996 under the title ‘A Method for Web Robots Control’. According to this document a Web site administrator can indicate which parts of the site should not be visited by a robot, by providing a specially formatted file, in http:// . . ./robots.txt. The other mechanism assumes that a Web author can indicate if a page may or may not be indexed, or analyzed for links, through the use of a special Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) META tag i.e., a ‘Robots META tag’. However, these mechanisms rely on cooperation from the robots, and are not even guaranteed to work for every robot. Moreover, as already suggested here above (DoS), some of these robots may not be so friendly. They could be run e.g., with the malicious intent of attacking a Web site (then, they just ignore the robots.txt file and the robots meta tags) so as it becomes overloaded and start refusing to serve legitimate users i.e., the human beings trying to use normally the site. Also, although the information made available on a site may not be confidential, an administrator may want to prevent an unlimited dissemination of it that would otherwise result of its indexing and referencing by all sorts of robots. The standard way of achieving this is to protect a Web site through some form of authentication of which the more common method is to manage a list of registered users having a password so as they have to sign on upon accessing the site. The obvious drawback of this is that administrators must manage and update a closed list of users thus, requiring a registration step for a first consultation of a site also, assuming that users remember passwords in subsequent consultations. This may not be at all what administrator wanted to achieve in a first place and may even be counterproductive since it will certainly discouraged some individuals, willing to browse a site, to go further if they are requested to register.
Thus, it is a broad object of the invention to prevent Web site contents from being investigated by robots.
It is a further object of the invention of not discouraging human beings, attempting to access a robot protected Web site, to proceed by imposing a registration at first access and a log on procedure at each subsequent access.
It is still another object of the invention not to rely on robots cooperation for barring them access to contents of Web sites.
Further objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent to the ones skilled in the art upon examination of the following description in reference to the accompanying drawings. It is intended that any additional advantages be incorporated herein.